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Title: Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, Volume 2 (of 14), 1899
Author: Various
Editor: Franklin Lafayette Riley
Release Date: October 27, 2014 [EBook #47208]
Language: English
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PUBLICATIONS
OF
THE
Mississippi Historical Society
Edited by
FRANKLIN L. RILEY
Secretary
Reprinted 1919
BY
DUNBAR ROWLAND, LL. D.
Secretary
VOL. II.
OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI:
PUBLISHED BY THE SOCIETY.
1899.
OFFICERS FOR 1899
PRESIDENT:
GENERAL STEPHEN D. LEE, Columbus, Mississippi.
VICE-PRESIDENTS:
PROFESSOR R. W. JONES, University of Mississippi. JUDGE B. T. KIMBROUGH, Oxford, Mississippi.
ARCHIVIST:
CHANCELLOR R. B. FULTON, University of Mississippi.
SECRETARY AND TREASURER:
PROFESSOR FRANKLIN L. RILEY, University of Mississippi.
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE:
(IN ADDITION TO THE ABOVE OFFICIALS)
PROFESSOR J. M. WHITE, Agricultural and Mechanical College of Mississippi. PROFESSOR CHARLES
HILLMAN BROUGH, of Mississippi College. PROFESSOR W. L. WEBER, of Millsaps College. PRESIDENT J.
R. PRESTON, of Stanton College.
All persons who are interested in the work of the Society and desire to promote its objects are invited to become
members.
There is no initiation fee. The only cost to members is, annual dues, $2.00, or life dues, $30.00. Members receive all
publications of the Society free of charge.
Donations of relics, manuscripts, books and papers are solicited for the Museum and Archives of the Society.
Address all communications to the Secretary of the Mississippi State Historical Society, University P. O., Mississippi.
CONTENTS
Page
TITLE,
1
OFFICERS OF THE SOCIETY FOR 1899,
3
CONTENTS,
5
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN RECENT SOUTHERN LITERATURE, by Prof. C. Alphonso Smith,
7
IRWIN RUSSELL—FIRSTFRUITS OF THE SOUTHERN ROMANTIC MOVEMENT, by Prof. W. L. Weber,
15
WILLIAM WARD, A MISSISSIPPI POET ENTITLED TO DISTINCTION, by Prof. Dabney Lipscomb,
32
SHERWOOD BONNER, HER LIFE AND PLACE IN THE LITERATURE OF THE SOUTH, by Prof. Alexander L. Bondurant,
43
'THE DAUGHTER OF THE CONFEDERACY,' HER LIFE, CHARACTER AND WRITINGS, by Prof. Chiles Clifton Ferrell,
67
SIR WILLIAM DUNBAR, PIONEER SCIENTIST OF MISSISSIPPI, by Prof. Franklin L. Riley,
85
HISTORY OF TAXATION IN MISSISSIPPI, by Prof. Charles Hillman Brough,
113
TERRITORIAL GROWTH OF MISSISSIPPI, by Prof. J. M. White,
125
THE EARLY SLAVE LAWS OF MISSISSIPPI, by Alfred H. Stone, Esq.,
135
FEDERAL COURTS, JUDGES, ATTORNEYS AND MARSHALS IN MISSISSIPPI, by Thomas McAdory Owen, Esq.,
147
RUNNING MISSISSIPPI'S SOUTH LINE, by Peter J. Hamilton, Esq.,
157
ELIZABETH FEMALE ACADEMY—THE MOTHER OF FEMALE COLLEGES, by Bishop Chas. B. Galloway,
169
EARLY HISTORY OF JEFFERSON COLLEGE, by Mr. J. K. Morrison,
179
THE RISE AND FALL OF NEGRO RULE IN MISSISSIPPI, by Dunbar Rowland, Esq.,
189
GLIMPSES OF THE PAST, by Mrs. Helen D. Bell,
201
THE HISTORICAL OPPORTUNITY OF MISSISSIPPI, by Prof. R. W. Jones,
219
NANIH WAIYA, THE SACRED MOUND OF THE CHOCTAWS, by Mr. H. S. Halbert,
223
INDEX,
235
THE HISTORICAL ELEMENT IN RECENT SOUTHERN
LITERATURE.
BY C. ALPHONSO SMITH, A. M., PH. D.
The year 1870 marks an epoch in the history of the South. It witnessed not only the death of Robert E. Lee but the
passing also of John Pendleton Kennedy, George Denison Prentice, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, and William Gilmore
Simms. In literature it was not only the end of the old but the beginning of the new, for in 1870 the new movement in
Southern literature may be said to have been inaugurated in the work of Irwin Russell. I have attempted elsewhere to
trace briefly the chronological outlines of this literature from 1870 to the present time. In this paper, therefore, I shall
discuss not the history of this literature but rather the history in this literature.
When we compare Southern literature of ante-bellum days with that produced since 1870 we note at once certain
obvious differences of style and structure. In the older literature the sentences are longer, the paragraphs less coherent,
adjectives more abundant, descriptions more elaborate, plots more intricate and fanciful. In the newer literature the pen
is held more firmly; there are fewer episodes; incidents are chosen to illustrate character rather than to enhance the plot;
the language is more temperate; the pathos and humor more subtle; some fixed goal is kept in view and the action of the
story converges steadily toward this end.
But apart from these stylistic and structural differences there are differences that appeal to the student of history equally
as much as to the student of pure literature. Since 1870 Southern writers have begun to find their topics and their
inspiration in the life that is round about them. They are resorting not so much to books as to memory, observation and
experience. They are not rising into solitary and selfish renown; they are lifting the South with them. They are writing
Southern history because they are describing Southern life. The writings of Irwin Russell, Sidney Lanier, Joel Chandler
Harris, Miss Murfree, George W. Cable, Thomas Nelson Page, James Lane Allen, Miss Grace King, Mrs. Ruth
McEnery Stuart, and John Fox, Jr., are spreading a knowledge of Southern life and Southern conditions where such
knowledge has never penetrated before. And though we call this literature Southern, it is neither sectional in its appeal
nor provincial in its workmanship. This, then, is what I mean by the historical element in recent Southern literature.
It has long seemed to me that much of the immediate influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin both in this country and in
England was due to the fact that the South could not show in all of its ante-bellum literature a single novel treating the
same themes treated by Mrs. Stowe, but treating them from a different point of view. It was the first attempt to portray
in vivid colors the social and institutional conditions of the South. None of our writers had utilized the material that lay
ready to their hands. There was no story written in the spirit of Marse Chan or Uncle Remus which the South could
hold up and say,
"Look here, upon this picture, and on this."
The reception accorded Mrs. Stowe's book in the South teaches a valuable lesson, and a lesson which Southern writers
have for thirty years profited by Uncle Tom's Cabin was met by bitter criticism, by argument, by denunciation, by
denial, or by contemptuous silence. But the appeal made by a literary masterpiece, however deficient or faulty in its
premises, is not thus to be negatived. The true answer to Uncle Tom's Cabin and the most adequate answer that could
be given is to be found in the historical note that characterizes the work of Irwin Russell and those who have succeeded
him.
I wish to state, therefore, in somewhat broader terms than I have yet seen it stated, what seems to me the historical
importance of Irwin Russell in American literature. His priority in the fictional use of the negro dialect has been
frequently emphasized, but I wish to emphasize his priority in utilizing for literary purposes the social and institutional
conditions in which he himself had lived. Skill in the use of a dialect is a purely literary excellence, but when a writer
portrays and thus perpetuates the peculiar life of a people numbering four million, he is to that extent an historian; and
Irwin Russell's example in this respect meant a complete change of front in Southern literature. He did not go to Italy for
his inspiration as Richard Henry Wilde had done. You find no Rodolph, or Hymns to the Gods, or Voyage to the
Moon among his writings; but you will find that deeper poetic vision that saw pathos and humor and beauty in the
humble life that others had contemned.
The appearance of Christmas-Night in the Quarters meant that Southern literature was now to become a true
reproduction of Southern conditions. Our writers were henceforth to busy themselves with the interpretation of life at
close range. They were to produce a kaleidoscopic body of fiction, each bit of which, sparkling with its own
characteristic and independent color, should yet contribute its part to the harmony and symmetry of the whole.
I would not for a moment compare the genius of Irwin Russell with that of Chaucer or of Burns; and yet when Chaucer
in the latter part of his life turned from French and Italian sources to find an ampler inspiration in his own England, the
England that he knew and loved, he was but illustrating the change that Irwin Russell was to inaugurate in Southern
literature; and when Robert Burns broke through the classical trammels of the eighteenth century and lifted the poor
Scotch cotter into the circle of the immortals, he was but anticipating your own Mississippian in proving that poetry, like
charity, begins at home. To the student of literature, there is a wide difference between the Prologue to the
Canterbury Tales, The Cotter's Saturday Night, and the Christmas-Night in the Quarters; but to the student of
history the poems stand upon the same plane because each is a transcript of contemporary life.
Irwin Russell represents, therefore, a transition of vital significance in our literature, a transition that had been partly
foretold in the work of Judge Longstreet and Col. Richard Malcolm Johnston. There is as much local coloring in the
Georgia Scenes and the Dukesborough Tales as in the work of Irwin Russell; but I do not find the same deft
workmanship; I miss in the older works the sympathy, the pathos, and the self-restraint that enable Irwin Russel to be
local in his themes without being provincial in his manner.
I do not say that the poet or the novelist must never revert to past history or to historical documents for his topics. His
own genius and taste must be his surest guide to both as to topic and to treatment; but I do say that a nation is
unfortunate if the builders of its literature invariably draw their material from foreign sources or from the history that was
enacted before they were born.
"I have no churlish objection," says Emerson in his Essay on Self-Reliance, "to the circumnavigation of the globe for the
purposes of art, of study and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of
finding somewhat greater than he knows____ The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own
mind that the artist sought his model. And why need we copy the Doric or the Gothic model? Beauty, convenience,
grandeur of thought, and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the American artist will study with hope
and love the precise thing to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length of the day, the wants of the
people, ... he will create a house in which all these will find themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied
also."
The historical element, therefore, of which I am speaking is not synonymous with the historical novel. The critics apply
the term historical novel to those novels that attempt to reproduce the past. These novels are retrospective and
essentially romantic. In the work of Sir Walter Scott this form of literature attained its florescence. But I contend that
while the historical novel may have a genuinely human interest, its value as history is almost inappreciable as compared
with the historical value of the literature that portrays contemporary life. We do not study ancient history in Chaucer's
Legend of Good Women, but there would be a deplorable gap in our knowledge of fourteenth century England if The
Prologue to the Canterbury Tales had never been written.
A hundred years from now Dickens' Tale of Two Cities will not have the historical significance that David
Copperfield will have; because the Tale of Two Cities is based on records that are accessible to all students of the
French Revolution. It is not an interpretation of life at first hand; it is an interpretation only of books. Then, too, historical
investigation is even today far more accurate and scientific than when Dickens wrote. But David Copperfield, which
the critics have never called an historical novel, has an historical element that time cannot take away, for it is the record
of what an accurate observer saw and felt and heard in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historical novel,
therefore, in the current acceptation of the term, contributes nothing to the sources of historical study, though it does
popularize history and thus help to prepare an audience for the scientific historian.
Now, the South has produced her full share of historical novels. From Horse-Shoe Robinson in 1835 to The Prisoners
of Hope in 1898, Southern writers have shown themselves by no means insensible to the literary possibilities latent in
our colonial and revolutionary history. But it was not until 1870 that the South may be said to have had a school of
writers who, while not neglecting the historical novel proper, began to find the scenery and materials of their stories
chiefly in local conditions and in passing or remembered events. Much, it is true, has been lost to our literature, but
much has been saved.
It has often been said that the new movement in Southern literature was due to the influence of Bret Harte's works, but
such a statement hardly deserves refutation. The cause lies deeper than this. The events of 1861-65 not only broke the
continuity of Southern history but changed forever the social and political status of the Southern states. The past began
to loom up strange and remote, but "dear as remembered kisses after death." Men seemed to have lived a quarter of a
century in four years. They moved as in a world not realized. Now it is just at such periods that literature finds its
opportunity, for at such periods a people's historic consciousness is either deepened or destroyed, and this national
consciousness finds expression in historical literature.
The South, then, is slowly writing her history in her literature. Hardly a year passes that some new state or some new
period does not find a place in the onward movement. Only in the last year, hundreds of readers who care nothing for
formal histories have pored over Mr. Page's Red Rock and learned for the first time the inside history of Reconstruction;
in the pages of Miss Murfree's Story of Old Fort Loudon, they have seen the heroism with which the Tennessee
soldier won his state from the wilderness and the Indian; in Miss Grace King's De Soto and his Men in the Land of
Florida, they have followed the discoverer of the Mississippi on a journey as marvelous and romantic as the fabled
voyage of Jason; in The Kentuckians of John Fox, Jr., they have read again of that undying feud between highlander
and lowlander that has found expression in more than a hundred English and Scotch ballads; in Chalmette of Mr.
Clinton Ross, they have stood again with Jackson on an immortal battlefield; in The Wire Cutters of Mrs. M. E. M.
Davis, they have witnessed a hitherto unexplored region, that of West Texas, added to the growing map of Southern
literature; in The Prisoners of Hope, by Miss Mary Johnston, they have heard the first mutterings of insurrection under
the colonial tyranny of Governor Berkeley,—mutterings that a century later were to be reinforced by the pen of
Jefferson and the sword of Washington. And these books mark the record of but twelve months.
Need I say that the significance of this historical movement in our literature is vital and profound for every man and
woman before me? or that it merits the earnest consideration of every historical society organized to preserve and
perpetuate the facts of our history.
Let me remind you that the literary significance of the Civil War is as noteworthy as its purely historical significance.
That struggle meant far more to the South than to the North. To the North it meant the preservation of the Union and
the abolition of slavery. To the South it meant decimated families, smoking homesteads, and the passing forever of a
civilization unique in human history. But Literature loves a lost cause, provided honor be not lost. Hector, the leader of
the vanquished Trojans, is the most princely figure that the Greek Homer has portrayed; the Roman Virgil is proud to
trace the lineage of his people not back to the victorious Greeks but to the defeated Trojans; the English poet-laureate
finds his deepest inspiration not in the victories of his Saxon ancestors over King Arthur but in King Arthur himself, the
fated leader of a losing cause. And so it has always been: the brave but unfortunate reap always the richest measure of
literary immortality.
In conclusion, I believe that in the organization of the Mississippi State Historical Society and in the beneficent work that
it has wrought during its career of nine years, I see another indication of that growing historic consciousness without
which we cannot stand unabashed before the bar of future history. "Deeds of prowess and exalted situations cannot of
themselves" says Schlegel (History of Literature, Lecture I) "command our admiration or determine our judgment. A
people that would rank high in our esteem must themselves be conscious of the importance of their own doings and
fortunes." The invaluable work that is being done by this Society for the history of Mississippi is a part of that larger
movement of which I have spoken. Both testify to the advent of that historical spirit which "cannot be gotten for gold,
neither shall silver be weighed for the price thereof." If I read aright the signs of the times, the new century will not have
been many years old before the history of the South will be enshrined not only in annals and chronicles but in the living
letters of a nation's song and story.
IRWIN RUSSELL—FIRST FRUITS OF THE SOUTHERN
ROMANTIC MOVEMENT.
BY W. L. WEBER.
So wide is the connotation of the word Romanticism, we may make up almost any conceivable definition and be sure
we have respectable authority in agreement with the view we have taken. The fault to be found with the current
definitions is that they stress the source, at the expense, of the character of that influence which transformed "the age of
prose and reason" into the "Renascence of Wonder." The influence to be stressed in the use I shall wish to make of the
word Romanticism is protest against the settled, conservative, classical order of things. Secondarily, it will be
remembered that the source of much of the literary material used by the protestants is to be found in the remote past—
remote whether in time or in charge of mental attitude.
In order to be able to throw a clearly defined portrait of Irwin Russell on the canvas of Southern literature, it will be
necessary rapidly to review the main outlines of this Romantic movement in the development of English thought a period
which may be shown to be the prototype of our own after-the-war literary life.
We shall not go into details. First we should recall to mind the main literary currents of English thinking from the time of
Dryden to the end of the dictatorship of the great Cham himself. It will be readily remembered that fashion in literature
had changed soon after Shakespeare's death and his native wood-notes wild were forgot for a time. The age of prose
and reason followed. Self-consciousness was a characteristic note of the Augustan, the eighteenth century literature.
Narrowness of imagination, and faithfulness in copying made up the main classical elements in many an English poet
under the regime of Formalism.
"Back to nature!" was the rallying cry of a protest against this formalism—an inarticulate protest which culminated in the
Romantic movement. Under the leadership of Dryden and for more than a century after him, canons of literary art based
on classical models had almost undisputed sway. Aristotle filtered through Horace and Horace diluted by Boileau were
prescribed by doctors who would correct and amend English speech and literature. From these masters were drawn
rules so minute and so inflexible as to put to the death budding originality by the demand for "correctness." If the poet
were moved to describe pastoral scenes, he must needs go to Theocritus for the names of his characters, to Virgil for
the contour of his scenery. But all this classicism was counterfeit. It was "more Latin than Greek, and more French than
Latin." The classical poet, as he misnamed himself, followed with slavish persistence the creed which he had adopted. It
was an accepted law that "the best of the modern poets in all languages are those that have the nearest copied the
ancients." He would have nothing of country life. Rough and irregular scenery were distasteful to him. Mountains he
described by Gothic—his pet term of opprobrium. Scenery as well as thought must conform to the level. "Decent
conformity," then, characterized the Augustan age and enthusiasm had no place in the age of Dryden and of Pope.
Some of the characteristic features of the Romantic movement may be readily got at, by prefixing a negative to the
qualities of the classical school. The country, out door life, rugged mountains, folk-songs, ballads in every form, the
picturing of English people in English scenery were used as subject-matter—in other words, the telling what the writer
had himself seen and, therefore, what he really knew, instead of what he had read. It was this reaction against formalism
which produced such men as Chatterton, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott.
It is not within the purpose of this paper to give a full list of the writers who may be said to be the forerunners of this
movement which dominated English poetry during the first quarter of the Nineteenth Century. Nor is it needful to enter
into the controversy as to who first gave evidence of the changing attitude. So careful a critic as Theodore Watts assigns
the place of priority to Thomas Chatterton, styles him the Father of the Romantic School, and insists that to his influence
may be traced some of the best work of Keats and of Coleridge. It will always be well to remember that changes in
literary habit do not take place in a year, rarely in a decade. It will, therefore, be easy to point out poets as early as
Gray who gave prophecy of the new era. This much at least is noteworthy—putting aside the question as to who comes
first of all—that the new current of ideas began very early to flow through poets who were hardly more than boys.
Professor Beers has already reminded us that in Joseph Warton as well as in Thomas Chatterton—neither of whom
was more than eighteen years of age—we may see the set of the literary current.
It may not be insisting too strongly on a parallel to see in the history of Southern literature a state of affairs much like that
we have just sketched. It will be remembered that in 1818 Bryant sounded his protest against a "sickly and affected
imitation of the peculiar manner of the late popular poets of England." As late as 1848 Lowell did not hesitate roughly to
assert:
They stole Englishmen's books and thought Englishmen's thought,
With English salt on the tail our wild Eagle was caught.
In these circumstances it is not surprising that Sydney Smith should have asked with suggestion of truth even if with
evidence of venom, "Who reads an American book?" American literature in the Northern and Middle sections escaped
from bondage many years before the South came into its own literary inheritance. Just as unreasoning worship of a
pseudo-classicism had its death-grip on Eighteenth Century writers so a like uncritical devotion to the usually read
classic writers and to earlier English authors had checked the growth of the budding Southern literature of the first half
of the Nineteenth Century. Conservative as the South has always been in matters of thought it was not surprising that
this should be so. Paul H. Hayne tells what contemptuous references were made by the literary coterie of Charleston to
the early efforts of Simms because he dared aspire to cultivate the Muses, when he must needs get his Homer through
the medium of Chapman or of Pope. This respect unto classical authority was of long continuance among cultured men
and showed itself, also, in the dry and tedious essays of Legare who was reputed a great scholar.
It was, indeed, not until 1870 that the South may be said to have achieved literary independence. As the sway of
Greece and Rome passed away, the South came to be a literary dependency of England. Kennedy and Sims are
dominated by Scott, just as Wirt and his friends of the "Old Bachelor" group got their inspiration from the Spectator. Of
course there were poets as Hayne and Timrod and story-writers as Johnston and Thompson who sang and wrote
clearly and with a note of individuality. But Lowell might have described the greater part of Southern literary work in the
words:
Your literature suits its each whisper and motion
To what will be thought of it over the ocean.
With the same thought in mind Poe wrote that "one might suppose that books, like their authors, improve by travel, their
having crossed the sea is with us so great a distinction."
This natural conservatism was upheld by the fact that many Southerners of means sent their sons to England to be
educated. The South being settled for the most part by emigrants of English blood, it is not surprising that the controlling
influence should be from mother-country.
Before the war, Sydney Smith's cutting question might have been answered with greater suggestion of truth in the form,
"who reads a Southern book?" A not untruthful answer would have been, "Southerners do not." We have never
adequately supported our own writers. We have added to the tragedy of nations by allowing Poe to die the death of an
outcast; Timrod to break his heart, without a crust to eat or a penny to buy food; Lanier not to have time to record the
strains that were demanding utterance, in order to spend his wasting strength seeking support for wife and children;
Russell broken in courage and in fortune to find not even a resting-place in the soil of his native State. Before the war
the Southern library shelves were weighed down with Fielding, Smollett, Addison, Johnson, Scott and Dickens.
Charleston had a public meeting to congratulate Macaulay on the issuance of one of the later volumes of his History.
Simms and Timrod lived in the City by the Sea in obscurity and neglect. We have not yet reached the place where we
turn first to our own writers.
To say we had no writers, no books is not true. We had a plentiful supply of books whose writers with a kind of literary
metonymy transferred the conventionalities and commonplaces of English life to the atmosphere of the South. The result
was not English and it was not Southern but it had the worst features of both. Wax flowers were long a popular form of
domestic art and the literary amateur caught the unreality of the maker of flowers.
There was, indeed, abundant material in the South and much of it was made use of. A distinct weakness in our
workmanship arose from the fact that too much material was used for a given purpose. The stage was overcrowded
with characters, the plot was weakened by using too much incident. This surplus-age of incident seems to have
distracted the writer's attention from the details of his craft. The value of the work of art was lost in carelessness of
workmanship. The new order of things was to see a renaissance of simplicity. It was to be expected that in order to
bring about a re-crystallization of Southern literary canons a shock was essential. That shock came in the form of the
war between the States. New ideas, newly expressed was the inheritance.
The new school of Southern writers found their material near at hand and yet from a past growingly remote. They
delighted to tell of the days of slavery—to idealize that period, perhaps—and with some acquaintance with slavery as it
actually existed. While it has not been a half century since the master and his slave lived together in Southern lands, yet
the number of those who have had experiential knowledge of slave-life in the South is increasingly small. To be accurate
the picture of master and man had need to be painted quickly.
Perhaps the very first of our writers to give a true picture of negro life in negro dialect was Irwin Russell of Mississippi.
He was certainly the first to make use of verse to put before us the negro as he saw him. Russell's negro is for the most
part not the slave but the negro who is reconstructed in his legal relations, but altogether unreconstructed in habits of
thought and of action. That negro, a picture of whom was to be had only during the decade immediately after the war, is
the hero of much of Russell's verse. That he has pictured the character faithfully is evidenced by the fact of the life of his
work. Despite encouragements to die, the slender volume of posthumous verse still lives and seems destined to have
permanent place in American literature.
Russell's place in our literary history does not depend solely on the estimation put on his own work but is assured by the
fact of his influence on those he preceded in this new field. Joel Chandler Harris was one of the first to recognize the
genius of Russell and he doubtless looks upon the power of the young poet as one of the formative influences of his life.
Likewise Thomas Nelson Page delights to ascribe to the Bard of the Quarters the inspiration of his own literary life.
It will be remembered that in sketching the English Romantic Movement the fact was recorded that the boys Warton
and Chatterton occupied a place of prescience with regard to these new ideas. It will be worth while calling to mind that
Irwin Russell's relation to the Southern Romantic Movement was much the same. Already at sixteen years of age, he
had begun to write and ten years later he had completed his work and returned his talents to him who gave them.
The parallel to be drawn between the life of Chatterton and of Russell is interesting if not suggestive of actual
brotherhood of thought.
As mere boys they both began to write verse. They both made use of a medium other than mother tongue. Chatterton
manufactured for himself a speech we cannot do better than describe as the Rowley dialect; Russell put into form the
rude speech of the negro with whom he had grown up; yet he had no help in the difficult work of transcriber.
Chatterton found the tasks set for him in a lawyer's office unbearable while there was poetry in his mind to be written
down; Russell was actually admitted to the bar but the Muse of Letters had marked him for her own and the courtroom
knew him no more. Breaking away from the bondage of legal drudgery, Chatterton went with high hopes from Bristol to
London where for a few short months "the unhappy boy" strove against starvation only at last to be overcome in the
struggle for living.
Russell left Port Gibson and went to New York to enter upon a literary life but after buffetings not a few, he at last
entered into the eternal rest not vouchsafed on earth to that weary, outworn body.
Chatterton may be granted place as forerunner of that noble body of poets who have had part in making the poetry of
the Nineteenth Century as distinct contribution to English literature. Before Irwin Russell there were, indeed, fore-
gleams of the day that was to dawn, but it may not unfairly be urged that he was the first to turn his camera on one
section of our Southern life and give us a picture that has cause to be enumerated among the monuments which must be
consulted as primary authorities by the historian who will picture the life and thought of the Southern people.
WILLIAM WARD, A MISSISSIPPI POET ENTITLED TO
DISTINCTION.
BY DABNEY LIPSCOMB
A gentleman of advanced age, ripe culture, and extensive knowledge of the literature of the State, was asked, "Who is
the best poet Mississippi has produced?" Promptly he replied, "William Ward of Macon." Respect for the opinion of
the one who so unhesitatingly adjudged this pre-eminence among the poets of the State led to a study of William
Ward's life and poetry, the result of which is now presented.
At the outset, however, let it be understood that the purpose of this essay is not to establish Mr. Ward's supremacy as a
poet. Classifications of this kind in literature and elsewhere are generally unsatisfactory and often invidious, for
excellencies that vary greatly in kind are not to be measured in degree. Some would doubtless accord pre-eminence to
Irwin Russell for his humorous, sympathetic pictures of the quaintly sage and irrepressibly happy old-time plantation
negro. Others would as likely claim this honor for James D. Lynch of West Point, who, against over two hundred poets
of America, won for himself and his State, by unanimous vote of the committee of awards, the proud distinction of
welcoming the nations of the world to the great Columbian Exposition, and afterward of having his salutation ode
adopted as the Press Poem of America. Of him and his works more will be said on another occasion. Other classes in
attempts at gradation would prefer this one or that one for reasons as different as the peculiar merits of the poet or the
tastes of the admirers.
Panegyric cannot perpetuate a reputation. If so, Tupper, whose fame was predicted, would live as long as the language,
would now be more than a name. Joanna Baillie, too, whom even Sir Walter Scott describes as sweeping her harp
Till Avon's swans—
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again,
—where is she? Mindful of the futility of claiming for an author more than is warranted, no eulogy will be offered,
extravaganza will be avoided. On the contrary, that criticism will be eschewed which "damns with faint praise" what is
cordially admired, fearful lest others may not assent. William Ward and his poems shall speak largely for themselves;
knowledge of the man and his work being sufficient, it is believed, to justify the claim that he is a poet entitled to
distinction.
Like many others who have reflected honor on the State, he was a son of Mississippi by adoption, a New Englander by
birth. Son of William and Charlotte Ward, he was born in August, 1823, at Litchfield, Connecticut, an historic village,
the early home of the Beechers; once noted also for its famous law school, attended by many from the South, John C.
Calhoun among the number. Scarcely less was it famous for the beauty of the surrounding scenery and for the
aristocracy of its leading families, who boasted their descent from old English houses as much as did the Virginians of
their Cavalier and the Carolinians of their Huguenot ancestry. Social aristocracy in New England was a more prominent
feature of life there than is commonly supposed. Among the leading families of Litchfield was that of the Wards.
William, father of the subject of this sketch, was a jeweler by occupation, a man of integrity and unusual intelligence;
wealthy until middle life, when it appears that reverses overtook him. For this reason his children, excepting one,
perhaps, did not receive a college education as was intended. John became an Episcopal clergyman; Elias a jeweler,
like his father; Henry, sorely disappointed in not being able to attend Yale College, scholarly, poetic, took reluctantly to
printing an editorial work; Mary Charlotte, literary in her tastes, married a wealthy gentleman, traveled in Europe, and
wrote sketches of travel and a number of poems. Of Henry Ward, a word more in passing to indicate more fully the
literary leaning of the family. At the age of thirteen, his poem, "Novel Reading; or The Feast of Fiction," published in the
local paper, gave him notoriety and raised great expectations. Thwarted in his college aspirations looking toward the
ministry, he grew melancholy and excessively reserved. After forty years of life as a practical printer and editor, he left
at his decease manuscripts in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, versification of the Books of Job and Lamentations, and a
volume of hymns. His claim to the well-known hymn, "I Would Not Live Always," generally accredited to William
Augustus Muhlenberg, and also to the poem, "Tell Me Ye Winged Winds," usually ascribed to Charles Mackay, is set
forth in Harpel's Poets and Poetry of Printerdom. In it, too, may be found other poems by him and several by his sister
Mary, then Mrs. Webster.
But to William Ward, the youngest son, attention must now be turned exclusively, with a glance first at the brief but
important period of his life spent in his boyhood home. Of those early days which evidently left deep impression on his
after life, less can be said than could be wished. The beauty of the country about Litchfield must have impressed him as
it did Henry and Harriet Beecher, born amid the same surroundings, ten or twelve years before him. Like them, no
doubt, he gazed with delight on the glorious sunsets which Mrs. Stowe so enthusiastically describes, and roamed in
perhaps the same mood the woods in which they speculated whether Apollo had not there once built his altars. He, too,
wandered along the banks of crystal Bantam River and dreamily watched the clouds as they hooded and un-hooded
Mount Tom in the hazy distance. Nature there surely must have been "meet nurse for a poetic child."
His scholastic education was completed under the tuition of a learned Episcopal clergyman whose private academy for
boys was well patronized. He was an insatiable reader and a fairly good student, though his mind ran in literary lines
rather than to the study of the exact sciences. The classics he must have especially preferred, and in them been carefully
instructed, judging from the familiarity he manifests in his poems with the mythology and literature in general of Greece
and Rome. Astronomy seems to have laid strong hold upon him; for it held high place in his esteem in later life. He early
gave evidence of a poetic tendency, and some of his boyish effusions are said to have possessed considerable merit.
Intuition, environment, and reading apparently combined to make of this New England lad a poet. What the experiences
of active life contributed in this direction, a look ahead will show.
When only sixteen years of age, a great and unexpected change in his plans and prospects occurred. He was urged by
his brother Elias who had gone South and set up in business at Columbus, Mississippi, to come and learn under him the
watch repairing and jewelry business. Though his tastes and aptitudes led in opposite direction, the opening seemed too
favorable to be set aside. The invitation was accepted and bidding adieu forever to the home of his love, with mingled
enthusiasm and trepidation the young man set out on his long journey to the South. Embarking at New York on a sailing
vessel, he reached Mobile, Alabama, after a safe but lengthy voyage. Of the experiences of that voyage which
afterward gave coloring to some of his most poetic lines and of the amusing incident attendant upon his arrival at Mobile
notice cannot now be taken.
Ten or twelve years of quiet busy life at Columbus, Mississippi constitute the second distinct period in William Ward's
comparatively uneventful life. His letters home indicate that many of the sights and incidents connected with life in that
almost frontier land were new and startling to the scholarly youth from staid Connecticut. By degrees he became
accustomed to his surroundings, and identified himself with the society and business of the place. Modest and reserved
in public, with his friends he was ever a genial and interesting companion. More student than mechanic, he would
doubtless have preferred a literary career. As it was, his literary tendency continued to assert itself, and before attaining
his majority verses from his pen began to appear in print. At twenty or earlier he became a contributor to the
Philadelphia Saturday Courier, to which for ten years or more thereafter he continued to furnish poems or themes
chiefly classical and patriotic. First in order of time of those that have been preserved is "The Grave of Hale," which
appeared in the issue of June 3, 1843. In smooth and vigorous Spenserian stanzas, he protests against the neglect of the
martyr-patriot's grave.
"Alas! and hath no gentle honoring hand,
But that of Nature decked his tomb with flowers,
We mourn the heroes of some storied land,
And leave a cold and barren grave to ours."
Among other published poems of his early period indicative of his devotion to the classic Muse, and of his ardent
patriotism, may be named "The Egean," "Greece," "The Bellman of '76," and "Our Own New England."
These lines from the first two poems, written respectively in 1844 and 1845, but for the dates might seem to have been
inspired by the result of the late sad struggle between the Greeks and Turks:
"Bright sea! no more the naiad haunts
Thy pearl founts with a syren spell,
No sea-nymph on thy foam-bed pants,
Within her rainbow spawning cell,
The halo of departed years—
Sleeps like a dream upon thy sky,
While the dark curse of blood and tears
Is echoed back with freedom's sigh."
"Oh Greece! could ye but boast of Greeks the shame
That gathers o'er thee now would make thy altars flame."
For the tenderness and warmth of sentiment expressed therein, the poem, "Our Own New England," merits more than
simple reference to it. The last stanza shows how thoroughly Southern in ten years he had become. Friendships strong
and lasting had been formed, and he was now prominent among the citizens of a town that even then prided itself on its
culture. One of the intimate friends of Alexander K. McClung, he has left an appreciative tribute to that powerful, but
somber and erratic genius.
In 1850 Mr. Ward removed to Macon; Mississippi, and there lived till his death in 1887. Early in the fifties he married
Miss Emilie A. Whiffen, an estimable and highly cultured young lady of English parentage, then teaching in a female
institute at Crawford, Miss. The Philadelphia Courier contained a pleasant notice of the marriage, from which this
extract is taken: "We sincerely congratulate our esteemed correspondent, William Ward, Jr., Esq., whose delightful
verses have enriched but too seldom our Poet's Corner, upon the agreeable fact reported in our hymeneal department
last week." These were his halcyon days, during which he was prosperous and serenely joyful in his home. In 1856, he
built in the woods skirting the eastern edge of the town the modest but tasteful little cottage in which he spent the
remainder of his days. To verse he seems to have given but little time during those busy years; though occasionally he
still contributed a poem to the Courier and to the Macon and Columbus papers. Three daughters and a son came to
increase his pleasures and his cares. Meanwhile the war cloud lowered and the tempest broke in fury on the land he had
learned to love and call his own. But this was little heeded in comparison with the calamity which befell him in the midst
of those dreadful days in the loss of his devoted and helpful wife. His life "cleft in twain," as he expressed it, from that
time forward is thus described by one who knew and loved him: "To his half-orphaned children he became father and
mother. We have seen him in his cottage home spending his evenings in the bosom of his little family, assisting his
daughters with their lessons, amusing the children, looking after their comfort, and doing all in his power to make them
happy. Proud and sensitive, he bravely struggled through poverty that came to so many Southern families; and though at
times obliged to add the office of housekeeper to that of bread-winner for his young family, he never sank the dignity of
a gentleman to the servility of a drudge."
Under these circumstances, all the more honor is due to him that after the war he spurned the offers of place and wealth
extended by carpet-bag leaders of the Republican party who knew of his Northern birth. Instead of such a course, he
became in 1870 editor of the Macon Beacon, and was as pronounced a Democrat as he had been Whig in former
years. During intervals of work in his little shop he hurriedly wrote his editorials; and might often be seen walking up and
down behind the counter evolving a poem or a prose reverie, oblivious to his surroundings. But to poetry he gave no
more time than, as he said, he must. Outside the joys of companionship with books and with his children, he could truly
have exclaimed with Burns:
"Lease me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure,
My chief, amaist my only pleasure."
With his little ones, on Sundays, he walked in the woods hard by his house; and on clear nights he often pointed out to
them the stars and constellations, and told them of the myths that cluster about Orion, the Pleiads and other denizens of
the nightly firmament. He had his own telescope and frequently searched the heavens with it for hours. "It is well," he
says, "to look upon the Christmas skies when the most glorious constellations of the year are gathered as at the world's
great festival. It will give us higher conceptions of life and tone down excesses we too often indulge in through the
anniversary week that closes up the year."
But let us look more closely at the man himself and then give his work such examination as time left us will admit. Tall,
slender, erect in carriage, clean shaven, with dark brown hair and eyes, rapid in his movements, the scholar and the
gentleman written unmistakably on every lineament, and William Ward, the man, is as nearly portrayed as can now be
done; for except a little daguerreotype taken for his wife, which has been lost, he sat for no other picture. Singularly
reserved and almost shy in public, with his children and with his intimate friends he was delightfully communicative, a
vein of quiet humor often outcropping in his words and deeds.
Public life he generally avoided; offices which he might have held, he would not accept, although urged upon him. A
loyal, ardent Odd Fellow, like Abou Ben Adhem, he "loved his fellow-man," and was loved by them in turn. His
addresses and poems on the anniversaries of this order, and at decorations of the soldiers' graves were much admired.
Though educated for an Episcopal clergyman, he never united with the church, at least in the South, more than as a
vestryman for a time. It is to be regretted that, with outward eye so quick to see and interpret the true and beautiful, his
eyes of faith could not discern more clearly the full truth and beauty of God's written Revelation. If so, his pathetic lines
on "Hope," composed a few years after his wife's death, would have had a more triumphant ring than is contained in the
last two stanzas. Elsewhere hopes shines brighter and faith soars on stronger wings, as when in his "In Memoriam"
poem to his wife, he sings:
"Still for this grief so desolate, so lone,
A solace for unmated hearts is given,
Another hand, another voice hath known
The symphonies of heaven."
In the sixty-fourth year of his age, at the season he loved best, the Christmas-tide, December 27, 1887, the gentle spirit
of William Ward softly slipped from its earthly moorings. His body by loving hands was tenderly laid to rest in the
cemetery at Macon, his home for nearly two score years.
His spirit still lingers with us, embodied in the songs which he sang, now out of a glad, now out of an aching heart. Well
has it been said that a poet least of all needs a monumental pile. The Iliad towers high above the Pyramids, and will
outlast them by ages. William Ward has left no Iliad; he sang not of the gods and demi-gods; he struck the lyre, and not
the full-resounding harp. Intuition, early environment and scholastic training, as has been shown, combined to make of
him a poet. Life's dull and dark experiences seemed to repress but could not suppress in him the "noble rage." Visions
of beauty continually flitted in his imagination; music from choirs, visible and invisible, seemed ever to soothe and charm
his troubled, lonely heart. Especially in the closing years of his life was poetry a joy and comfort to him. As the burdens
of life were shifted to the shoulders of his children, he found more leisure, it appears, and indulged more frequently in
poetic expression of the mood or thought that deeply stirred within.
As might be supposed, his poems are of as diverse themes and varied measures as the moods and occasions which
suggested them. In them may be best shown the poet and to some extent the man; hence, they deserve and, it is
believed, will repay a full and close investigation. Hear him first, as in patriotic strain, he invites the world to his adopted
land:
COME TO THE SOUTH.
Come to our hill-sides and come to our prairies,
Broaden our fields with the spade and the plow;
Bring us from Deutsche-land to gardens and dairies,
To household and kitchen the fraulein and frau;
Come from the birth-land of Goethe and Schiller,
Schola...
